Teens stage mock earthquake drill

Jonathan Epper portrays an injured earthquake victim as Allison Pascua, a Simi Valley High School Teen CERT student, assists him in a disaster drill Wednesday afternoon in the school parking lot.

Ventura County Star

The magnitude-7.1 earthquake was centered in the girls locker room at Simi Valley High School on Wednesday afternoon.

Hannah Brown and Felicia Fisher entered the building hand in hand, wearing dark green hard hats and safety vests. Inside, sounds of pain could be heard coming from several corners of the dark room.

"Hang on. We're coming," said Brown, a senior.

Just inside the door, in the shower area, another teenager sat cradling her bloody face and crying. Brown and Fisher, a junior, checked the girl's tag and marked her with a tag of their own that read "delayed." Then they walked toward the next victim, whom they labeled "immediate."

It wasn't a real earthquake, but if it had been, the girls and the rest of their Teen CERT class were now trained to help emergency personnel in a disaster.

CERT, short for Citizen Emergency Response Training, is a national program to train civilians to help during disasters. The Ventura County program is overseen by the Ventura County Fire Department. Last year, Oak Park High School was the pilot for Teen CERT, which is the same program but adapted for teens.

"There are additional items in the curriculum like team-building and pre- and post-tests," said Ramona Armijo, the Fire Department CERT coordinator.

This year, Simi Valley High holds its first Teen CERT class. Students earn elective credit for class participation. Wednesday's simulation was designed to provide the students with a role-playing opportunity.

The 32 students in Jessica Ellis' CERT class got hard hats, vests and backpacks stocked with emergency equipment. For several weeks, they learned the basics of the program: emergency first aid, triage, safety, team management and search and rescue.

For the simulation, firefighters from Station 46 and Station 41 in Simi Valley helped set up and coordinate the effort. Personnel from the Simi Valley's Disaster Service Worker program also participated, along with young volunteers who served as victims to the disaster.

Robert Maas, from the Disaster Service Workers program, supervised the victims' makeup, called moulage, to help establish who was hurt the most.

"You've got a large head wound, maybe a little brain showing?" Maas said to Ann Patton, who works for the Fire Department's emergency medical services division and who was applying the moulage. To Yalda Fazli, the victim with the head wound, he said: "You are dead. They shouldn't move you at all."

Assistant Principal Shawn Rumble went through CERT years ago. When he learned that Ellis wanted to do a Teen CERT class at Simi Valley High, he was ecstatic, he said.

"We're so excited," he said. "We do our earthquake drills here, and now we can have the kids involved."

In the parking lot between the locker rooms and the stadium, makeshift triage and first-aid sites were set up. Teams of students were organized to identify and retrieve victims, and incident commanders kept careful notes of all that happened. Supervising firefighters quizzed the students on what they were doing.